What is a place of remembrance?

Memory Sites and Cultural Memory

Memory sites, to use the term put forward by Pierre Nora, are not only geographical and real sites in our collective cultural memory. Memory sites (lieaux de mémoire) can also be imaginary sites, persons, biographies, events, legends, myths, literature, works of art, compositions and all other productions of the human spirit that evidently exist in our collective memory.

However when we look at the culture and history of Polish citizens in Germany we see that it is often not clear to provide evidence of any connections with collective memory. For this reason the Porta Polonica documentation centre is offering a dynamic concept with an open and broad understanding of memory sites. Hence the Atlas of Memory Sites will be constantly expanded to include new information, sources and cross references.

In addition the Atlas will provide readers with an opportunity to discuss memory sites which have faded in our collective memory – places, events or cultural and historical features which have been of great importance to Polish citizens in Germany. We should also not forget memory sites which have disappeared from view or have been consciously wiped out in the course of political and historical upheavals. Thus the Atlas of Memory Sites also intends to provide new impulses and contribute towards an active culture of memory.

Furthermore, we intend to enlarge the Atlas with an “Encyclopaedia Polonica”, a dynamic multimedia lexical and of culture and history of Polish citizens in Germany, primarily dedicated to all those themes which cannot yet be said to be collective memory sites and are therefore not mentioned in the Atlas.

In this way the whole of the “Porta Polonica““ Internet portal will successively and simultaneously make up a mosaic and an Archipelago of memory (Michel Foucault) of the culture and history of Poles in Germany.

Jacek Barski and Dietmar Osses

New! WebQuest for education.

Catalogue of Exhibition “Between Uncertainty and Confidence. The Art, Culture and Everyday Life of Polish Displaced Persons in Germany 1945-1955, Dortmund, 2016.

LWL-Industriemuseum 2017

Info

“A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet. WebQuests are intended to use learners’ time meaningfully, to focus on the use of information instead of the search for information, and to support learners on the level of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.”

(Definition by Bernie Dodge, the inventor of the WebQuest)

In the context of our current exhibition “Between Uncertainty and Confidence. The Art, Culture and Everyday Life of Polish Displaced Persons in Germany 1945-1955”, which is accompanied by a huge number of articles on our portal, we are offering schools a WebQuest containing complete training documentation.

Between Uncertainty and Confidence. The Art, Culture and Everyday Life of Polish Displaced Persons in Germany 1945-1955

The end of the Second World War liberated people in Germany from wartime events and the National Socialist regime. Around 8,000,000 people who had been transported from their homes to Germany during the war and survived forced labour, the concentration camps and civilian labour, were also liberated. They were regarded as "Displaced Persons", to be cared for immediately.

But it was not long before huge difficulties arose, especially for Polish Displaced Persons (DPs). The upshot was that many of them were prevented from returning home for many years and some of them were never able to return. Despite the lengthy periods of uncertainty life had to go on and every day conditions had to be organised in an alien country. But why did Polish DPs have such great difficulties in returning home quickly? What did the everyday life of Polish DPs in the camps look like? How did the DPs and the German population react to one another? And there again, there was another special feature: the Polish enclave of Maczków...